What the Craving Is Actually Doing

Beloved, I beg you as foreigners and pilgrims, to abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; (1 Peter 2:11, WEB)

Peter writes to Christians as sojourners and exiles, urging them to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. The word that stays with me is war. We usually think of lust as something that feels good, a pleasure we are told we should give up for reasons of duty or religion, a harmless comfort that the rules happen to forbid. Peter describes them as anything but neutral.

He says these passions are actively fighting against you, waging a campaign aimed at your soul, at the deepest part of who you are before God. This changes what the craving even is. It is not a friend you are being asked to send away for no good reason. It is a combatant, and it means you harm. That reframing matters in the moment of temptation, because it is hard to say no to something you experience only as a friend offering comfort at the end of a long day.

It becomes easier to resist when you understand that the thing whispering to you does not have your good in mind. It promises relief and delivers heaviness. It offers to make you feel like a man and leaves you feeling like less of one. It wants to wear you down, to leave you emptier and more ashamed than it found you, and then to come back tomorrow and offer the same cure for the wound it caused. Once you have seen that pattern in your own life a few times, the promises start to sound hollow even while they are being made.

Peter also calls you a sojourner, someone who belongs elsewhere and is only passing through this place. You are not a citizen of this war's terms, and you are not obligated to keep paying its price. Ask God to let you see the passion clearly for the enemy it is, and to remember, when it comes dressed as a friend, where your true home lies and who is waiting there for you.